Marie Spodek is my mom.

This picture shows her running her first marathon at 66 years old, never having run more than 5k at once before training.

She’s been an entrepreneur, stay-at-home-mom, traveler, writer, and more.

On travel, she wrote of her international start after growing up on a farm, then in a small town in South Dakota:

Ten days after I graduated from Augustana College (1965), I was in Kashmir, India, in a houseboat…preparing to teach English as a second language at St. Xavier’s College, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. What a long ways from a one-room country school house in South Dakota. Less than a year later, I traveled from Bombay to Dar es Salaam on a third-class boat to visit with many of my students who had traveled from East Africa to Ahmedabad for their education…

Her more recent trips are at travelblog.org.

As an entrepreneur, educator, and writer on real estate, she has run a school, written and taught for real estate boards across the country, and sold houses.

On quilting, here are some of her quilts.